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This 12ft Python Pet Is Freaking Parents Of The Internet Out

Dad shares images of 12ft python hanging out with his daughter

Ed Taoka shared a video of his four-year-old daughter chilling out and watching TV with their 12ft reticulated python “pet” this week, and nearly broke the internet. As you can imagine, some parents are freaking the hell out at the site of a giant python hanging out near a four-year-old.

“My daughter is perfectly safe,” Toaka writes. “Interaction with any animal and child must always be supervised. No, it is not sizing her up. That is a stupid myth. Neither snakes have any desire to bite or eat us. Do you know what this snake loves to eat? Rats. She loves rats. Won’t eat anything else. For the love of god I have tried rabbit but she is a really fussy madam. She just eats defrosted rats.”

It has never been proven that snakes have the capability to “love” things, but don’t tell that to their owners. Owners bond with their pets, and frankly that’s probably really all that matters. If your snake is cuddling up to you for warmth and is excited to see you because he wants to be fed — that’s probably enough of an indicator of “bonding” for most. As for letting a snake this size around a four-year-old, these snakes are well-documented as being great pets — as long as their needs are attended to.

There are deaths attributed to the giant pythons on record, but they are not common. In the few instances found of pythons attacking children, they were not kept in secure cages and were significantly underweight. Still some resources say they are too dangerous to keep as pets. “They can make good captives, but keepers should have previous experience with such large constrictors to ensure safety to both animal and keeper. Although their interactivity and beauty draws much attention, some feel they are unpredictable,” Wikipedia documents.”They do not attack humans by nature, but will bite and possibly constrict if they feel threatened, or mistake a hand for food. While not venomous, large pythons can inflict serious injuries.”

“No we have never been bitten,” Toaka explains in his post. “These are tame (by dictionary definition), captive bred, pet snakes. They have been handled nearly everyday – multiple times a day since they were babies.There are more dangerous issues with other animals such as dogs and horses to children than non-venomous snakes.”

It’s pretty natural for the majority of people to scream, “HELL NO” when seeing this video for the first time. But if you visit Toaka’s YouTube channel you’ll see that he and his family have been owning and interacting with pythons for years.

In less than a week, the video has been shared nearly 90,ooo times. There are over 40,000 comments and counting. Some commenters are definitely not on board with Toaka’s decision to let this python anywhere near his kids:

The snakes sizing her up what’s wrong with you she could be eaten those breed of snakes are dangerous and aggressive!

What is wrong with these parents?

I love snakes I think they are awesome. I also think this is an extremely dangerous situation. Do you know that snakes don’t yawn from being tired they yawn to stretch for a large meal. THAT SNAKE IS PREPARING TO EAT.

And others who see no problem with it:

The reason the snake yawned is because it read all the boring comments on here suggesting he is sizing the child up ready to eat her!

She’s BEAUTIFUL and so is your daughter, I think this video is so sweet…I’m sorry you have to deal with a bunch of assholes making comments out of pure ignorance…knowledge is power people, don’t speak about what you don’t know.

Taoka responded to some of the backlash he’s received since his video went viral.